Sunday Book Review

Inside the List

By GREGORY COWLES

July 11, 2014

The Fur Flies: Comedy is like sex, or subatomic particles: The more you try to analyze it, the more elusive it becomes. So it’s probably futile to look too closely at Joan Rivers’s latest book, “Diary of a Mad Diva,” new at No. 7 on the hardcover nonfiction list. But what the heck. As its title suggests, the book is structured as a conventional diary that happens to be filled with the author’s brand of rapid-fire politically incorrect jokes — in the second entry, Rivers contrasts herself favorably with Anne Frank: “I’ve written six books, and Anne? She didn’t even complete her one.” Rivers is unavoidably outré — racist, sexist, raunchy, crass — which isn’t to everybody’s taste. (Another way comedy resembles sex, and maybe subatomic particles — I’m no scientist — is that different folks like different strokes.) But readers seem divided as to whether Rivers is truly meanspirited or whether it’s all a provocation, a persona she slips into as easily as the fur coat she’s wearing on her book’s cover. When the CNN anchor Fredricka Whitfield suggested as much in a recent interview, noting that Rivers is a well-known animal rights advocate and wondering whether the fur was there just for its shock value, Rivers went ballistic. “Are you wearing leather shoes? Then shut up,” she said, before storming off the set. “I don’t want to hear this nonsense.” She didn’t seem to be joking.

The Great War: It’s been almost exactly a hundred years since the start of World War I, and amid all the commemorations, the first best seller pegged to the centennial is not a history but a novel: Jacqueline Winspear’s “The Care and Management of Lies” enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 16. Winspear, who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, was born and raised in Kent, England, and is no stranger to the war to end all wars — her Maisie Dobbs crime series, about a British psychologist grappling with the war’s aftermath, makes regular appearances on the best-seller list. But “The Care and Management of Lies” is a stand-alone novel, about a young bride who learns to take care of the family farm after her husband is sent to the front. (It was inspired by “The Woman’s Book,” a 1911 homemaking manual that Winspear quotes throughout.) Winspear’s interest in World War I is personal: Her grandfather was injured at the Battle of the Somme. In an essay she wrote after touring the site 10 years ago, she remembered him “still removing shrapnel from his wounded legs until the day he died at age 77.”

Notes: Laura Hillenbrand’s “Unbroken” climbs two spots to No. 3 on the hardcover nonfiction list following the death of its subject, Louis Zamperini, at age 97. The book has spent 176 weeks on the list. . . . With “William Shakespeare’s The Jedi Doth Return,” new at No. 12 on the hardcover fiction list, Ian Doescher has now translated all three of the original “Star Wars” movies into iambic pentameter and made them best sellers.